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To add to my wife’s comments. The peanut butter and jelly we get is also all natural. Smuckers brand has all natural at Walmart and Jiff and Peter Pan peanut butter offers all natural options. We are Just fortunate our son loves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and eats them every day at school for lunch. When he starts middle School we might be able to send things we make at home that he can heat up at school himself but we will cross that bridge when we get there. We also deal with the birthday parties and keeping him away from school foods. It’s hard. But we have told him he also has to do his part and stay away from foods he is not supposed to eat at school or at birthday parties. We tell him it’s not fair and we understand. But it is what it is. Sometimes he does eat these foods but eventually he knows the consequences and for a 9 year old he’s had to make very mature decisions on his own to say no which he mostly does now. We are very proud of him. What we have found since this started a little over a year ago is that his tics are inside him. We don’t know if they will ever fully go away or if he will outgrow them. Sometimes it stays dormant. Time will tell. What we do know for certain is that you have to look for the triggers that cause the tics to flare up. For us we know certain foods and ingredients are big triggers. So limiting or eliminating these foods, with the help of certain essential oils and his small dose of guanfacine medicine it really keeps his tics very low to unnoticeable. Like my wife said feel free to reach out to us any time and check back. We respond as quickly as we can each time. I hope this helps. Hang in there!

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It’s amazing what you described here. The symptoms you describe are the exact tics our son had. We find that the tics move around or show up at different times in different areas. Now that we have it under control and when he eats a little something he shouldn’t the tics start in his stomach as you describe and a head nod until we can get it out of his system. We know your concerns of pain and other kids. At its worst our son could barely walk as he would take a few steps and he would stop and one side of his body would seize and shake with his tongue sticking out. Yes some kids are cruel and my wife made many phone calls to parents explaining our situation and to please speak to their kids. It was the hardest thing we have ever dealt with. The worst days like that we would keep him home from school. After a while our son would tell us the amount of pain he was in due to his body straining and the headaches he was getting. He looked as though he had MS when he walked. We had him tested for all of this and came up negative. Oddly enough I spoke in depth with someone who’s brother was diagnosed with MS for over 20 years. At his worst the doctors told the family to monitor his diet and they found an organic natural diet helps. The family took turns staying with him and cooking organic meals for him. They noticed in a matter of weeks that his MS symptoms were dramatically lowered and within a year all symptoms were gone and doctors tested him and said he no longer has MS. Supposedly there is no cure for MS.... They did exactly as we did. Essential oils and diet. Sorry to speak of all that but I found it amazing the similarities. Our son was also 8 years old when his tics started. Almost exactly 2 weeks after his 8th birthday. As you research you will find testimony that those that are diagnosed with tics or Tourette’s almost always happens when a child turns 8 years old or somewhere very close to that age. I’m still trying to find out the answer as to why that is. Thanks to my wife’s never ending search for answers other than drugs or no hope answers from our doctors she came across the use of essential oils and later about diet related symptoms. Once started down this road we both tirelessly researched daily and nightly. Ultimately led us to this forum to learn and share our story. I recommend meeting with a neurologist or specialist to at least rule out something we may not know. Otherwise I feel strongly the steps we have mentioned will drastically help and should see noticeable difference in a couple of weeks. To help sleep at night use lavender essential oils. If real bad use more. It helps with relaxing and falling asleep without use of drugs. I will have my wife post more info on here as well a little later. Hang in there!

Hi WorriedMum, My wife and I know exactly what you are going through. My son in the beginning had similar facial seizure and tongue sticking out. It would lock in that position for a few seconds and repeat the process every 10 seconds or so. I’m so sorry your family is going through this and especially your daughter. So many people don’t understand how this affects the entire family. How old is your daughter and when did her tics begin? Hopefully you have read our posts above and see the steps we have taken. We have not used a jasmine oil although the oils we use might have some jasmine mixed in but I’m not sure. Of the oils we use I personally believe vetiver is the most effective. But they are all natural and can’t hurt so by all means I recommend trying different ones and monitor results. I highly recommend using good quality oils as they do vary of purity and potency. Cheaper ones are not as pure and effective. Essential oils I believe really are helpful. However I strongly believe the biggest help is diet related. We had to start from scratch and monitor our sons diet and watch the effects of foods and drinks. Processed meats are the worst. Especially hot dogs. They trigger the worst of his tics. You have to consider all ingredients in your daughters diet. From artificial sweeteners, food colorings, msgs, gmo’s, preservatives, etc... High fructose corn syrup is another ingredient we stay away from. We have a completely natural diet or as close to a natural diet as we can. Our son does not have gluten or dairy problems. He drinks milk and eats breads. He eats a peanut butter and jelly sandwich almost daily (natural peanut butter and jelly). However if he eats a regular cheese pizza he will break out in tics. But for some reason a gluten free pizza does not bother him at all. No idea why. That’s part of the process of removing and reintroducing foods to your daughters diet and monitoring their effects. He is also still on his medicine guanfacine. We have slowly cut his dosage to a half a pill. It’s a very low dose. We cut the pill in half and give it to him every night after dinner. My wife crushes it and puts it in a spoonful of milk or water. Over the summer break while school is out we tried recently lowering his dose over a course of time a quarter dose and then removed it completely. A few days after going to no medication we noticed some of his tics returning. Not anywhere close to as bad as they were. But enough that we made the decision to put him back on half a pill. He’s pretty much back to normal. Why some people are sensitive to not non natural or non organic foods or chemicals, I don’t know. It probably means it’s not natural for humans to consume chemicals and additives so commonly found in our food chain. For our neurologist to say foods have nothing to do with my sons tics was shameful. It is known that chemicals can have affects on your neurological system so why would they think eating chemicals added in our foods would not have similar effect. Too many people think it can’t be as simple as changing your diet or environment. But in most cases it is that simple. I’m not saying that is the case 100% of the time but by far most. I truly hope this is the case for your daughter and you see results from your research and diet monitoring. Let us know if you have any questions and by all means post any updates. What you find might help someone else here. I’m happy to say that my son is still doing great! He recently went to a friends birthday party a week ago. Even with us explaining not to have birthday cake. He did eat a small piece of cake. No surprise to us he showed signs of tics. Nothing really bad. But it took a couple of days to get out of his system and he seems back to normal. There is hope! We all look forward to hearing from you!

Hi mlee, Thank you for your response and details. Please see my response above to Tropea22 on how I apply each of the oils we use on my son. I was a skeptic but we really have seen some amazing results. After finding this website and reading Shelia's book, I believe the real root cause is food related as you mention. However the oils seem to naturally relax the tics and helps a lot. But again we are new with this and thankful we found this forum. We are planning an appointment with a local allergist to run tests similar to what you mention above. I will see if we have an ND doctor and look into the food tests you mention. I'm like you as we are doing a multi-tiered approach and things we have learned in this forum and in Shelia's book. Thanks again for your reply!

Hi tropea22, I'm not familiar with a carrier oil. But since I only apply the essential oils only I guess I do not use a carrier oil. We apply the oils using one drop each. They're pretty strong so one drop is all I'm aware is needed. We apply 3 of the essential oils in the morning every day. See as follows: Stress Away: Rub it up and down his spine. Valor: Rub it in the middle of the small in the back of his neck just below his hair line. Vetiver: Rub it on his big toe before putting his socks on. We apply 2 of the essential oils before he goes to be. See those as follows: Peach & Calming: Rub it in on his back. Lavender: I can't remember if it goes on his chest or on the small in the back of his neck. My wife usually puts the bedtime oils on. The mentioned oil types are from the brand "Young Living". We rub in the oils with our finger. I'm not promoting any particular brand. We just happen to know someone selling this brand. From what I can tell there are many brands and cheaper ones can be found on Amazon, etc.. Young Living is one of the more expensive essential oils. My understanding in researching the cheaper oils versus the more expensive oils is the cheaper oils and brands will use a plant or seed multiple times to extract the essential oils where as the more expensive oil brands only use the plant or seeds one time for a much higher potency. Using these oils were the first real noticeable differences we seen with our son and reducing the number and level of his motor tics. I'm still hoping for a response from others who have more definitive or technical answers or if lab tests have been performed with results on the use of essential oils for TS and tics. I will also say finding this site a few days ago has really helped in giving us what we felt we already knew about foods. We would start to notice every time he at hot dogs or pizza that his tics would increase dramatically. So we stopped feeding him foods like this. After finding this site and reading the book mentioned in my original post above we are convinced foods with MSG's, artificial sweeteners, preservatives and other additives are causing his tics. We have been buying mostly organic foods now and have seen really good results. We are making an appointment with an allergist physician as well to look at food allergies he is allergic to. Let me know if I can answer any more questions. We're all in this together!

Hi Supermom13. Yes I apply them to my son. Essential oils are all natural. I apply one drop of each per day. Stress Away, Valor and also Vetiver one drop each in the morning before he goes to school. Lavender and Peace & Calming one drop each before he goes to bed. Except for Lavender, the others are a mix of different Essential Oils. Young Living is the brand we are using and more details can be found on their site I'm sure. I've also ready other blogs on this site of people using Jasmine essential oils. I'm looking into that one.

Thank you Chemar for your response! I've seen others in other blogs mention Jasmine Oil being effective. What exactly does the Jasmine oil target and affect to help? Also the friend we bought the essential oils from, her husband has severe ADHD and struggled to function in college. Medicines made him a zombie and many mood swings and felt terrible. She researched and learned from others about using essential oils for ADHD. She said that the 4 or 5 oils he used helped him tremendously and has been using them for the past 15 + years with little issue with ADHD.

Hello, I'm new here and first time typing a message. My wife and I have 3 children ranging from Highschool, Middle School and our youngest 8 year old son in 3rd grade. My oldest two kids have no signs or issues with tics, etc.. However my youngest son over the past summer shortly after school ended started showing signs of small motor tics. We didn't think much about it at the time. Annoying as we thought it was becoming a bad habit. As the summer went on we noticed new facial tics, heading jerks and eye twitching. Then straining his right hand and arm would begin seizing. We would take him to his pediatric doctor who ran blood work and say all is well and he's healthy. Which left us frustrating. The tics they would say he would just grow out of it likely. Then a couple weeks before the new school year for 3rd grade were to start his tics got even worse. We could tell his focus was getting bad from being focused on his tics. Shortly after we met with a Neurologist. Our son went through a series of questions and motor function tests to determine if he had Tourette's or chronic tics. She ruled out Tourette's be said he has Transient Tic disorders. On a scale of 1 to 10 she said he's about a 6. Said he would eventually grow out of it most likely but time would tell. We mentioned things like foods as we started noticing that when he ate things like hot dogs or pizza his tic activity seemed to be much worse, etc... She said I assure you foods has nothing to do with tics. What do we know, we're not doctors or neurologists....So we were disappointed but thought at least it's not Tourette's or it could be worse. She wanted to put him immediately on Guanfacine. We were uneasy and worried about side effects but thought they are the experts. Each dose is a pill cut in half. She wanted us to give him one dose (half pill) each day for a week. Then starting week two increase his dose to twice per day. Then week 3 give him 3 doses per day (1.5 pills per day). The first couple of days we noticed over a weekend he was more tired than usual. Fell asleep in the middle of the day. (That never happens). But on day 4 he woke up and we noticed not a single tic. He went to school and no tics. The next several days he had no tics whatsoever. Then we started week two and after a couple of days of his increased dose of twice per day his tics came back out of nowhere and worse than ever. We called the Dr. and we were told if 1 dose worked then we just need to scale him back and keep it at one dose. We did that for weeks and his tics kept getting worse. Kids at school were starting to make fun of him and his social well being was going down hill fast. Prior to this he, of all my kids, loves school. Extremely social and has many, many friends. All teachers know and love him. One of those kids who just stands out for how good natured and great. Then he doesn't want to go to school. Comes home crying everyday. His tics eventually got so bad and intense that it was debilitating. He could barely walk. The entire right side of his body would tic and cease up and stop him in his tracks. His foot would curl, his leg would get stiff, his arm and hand would cease, his head would turn and neck tighten, eye would close and his tongue would stick out. All at the exact same time and would start happening every few steps or every 8 seconds or so. We cried every night feeling hopeless. On the real bad days we kept him home from school. We researched the internet looking for anything. We came across several blogs where people were using Essential Oils for them or their kids and with much success. We have a friend who sells Young Living brand essential oils and contacted her. She told us testimony she has received from many of her clients that have tics and a few that have TS have seen major decrease of tics to almost no tics using Essential Oils. My wife and I were skeptic but we would spend almost anything at this point. The friend gave us some free samples that she said her other clients use to try. Those oils are as follows: Peace & Calming Oil: One drop at night Lavender oil: One drop at night Stress Away oil: One drop in the morning Valor Oil: One drop in the morning Vetiver Oil: One drop in the morning Within 3 or 4 days of using these oils every day, he woke up getting ready for school and we noticed his tics dropped by over 90%. He's been on them now about 5 weeks or so and still has small tics but most people don't even notice. In fact we took him to an occupational therapist to help us with the remaining tics which is not a much less noticeable head but nothing like it was. Leg and arm tics and hand or eye strain or tongue tics have not been seen since. In fact the occupational therapist said had we not pointed his remaining tics out, she would not have noticed he had any. After speaking with the OT we realized she does nothing to help solve the tic issues. So that was our first and last visit there. Currently still doing the essential oils mentioned above and still give him the one dose (half pill) of Guanfacine per day. But we still noticed some days his tics would be more often or a little worse than other days. Still trying to research we again notice after eating foods like hot dogs, pizza, etc.. that his tics are more noticeable and frequent. We were thinking there might be a link to foods with preservatives, MSG's, additives, etc.. Still remembering all our doctors have told us that has no link to tics and TS. But we notice and started doing research. My wife found a blog or groups of moms on line regarding TS and tic disorders that also discuss essential oils and also food related. One mom had a recommended book "Natural Treatments for Tics & Tourette's" by Sheila Rogers DeMare which we ordered immediately and have been reading for the past couple of days. Since Sheila is the author it led me to this website. I now have hope and realize all our doctors have failed us completely. We are starting to make more note and attention to foods. We started buying organic foods and less sweets and junk foods. We had already cut out hot dogs and pizza. Now we are going much further and reading ingredients. Our next step in to make an appointment with an Allergy clinic and see what foods and environmental issues he is allergic to. This book has given us much hope. My question is for Sheila DeMare and any others with regards to essential oils. Has any formal testing been done to confirm the effectiveness of Essential Oils in use of reducing tic disorders and TS? Has essential oils helped anyone else in this forum? Sorry my story is so long! I just found myself typing and going on and on reliving the whole experience! I'm so glad we found this site. Thanks! Chris